Dr. Dobb's Journal January 2003
I was shocked when I opened the November 2002 issue of BYTE magazine. (Well, if I had really somehow "opened" it, I probably would have been shocked, since it's an electronic publication.) Shocked, I say, to read that Jerry Pournelle had recently bought an Apple Newton MessagePad on eBay.
Shocked, I mean, because if he had only asked, I'd have made him a great deal on mine. Either of them. Or both. Plus the developer kit. But Jerry never calls, he never writes...I suppose he's still mad at me for suggesting, in a past "Swaine's Flames," that he looked like Ernest Hemingway or Ashleigh Banfield. Or both.
Jerry and I have our differences. One of the differences between Jerry and me is where we get our news. At least, I assume that this is one of the differences between Jerry and me. I don't actually know where Jerry gets his news, but I've always assumed that he got it straight from a highly placed official at NASA. Or from a lieutenant colonel running a secret war out of a basement office in the Pentagon. Or both.
I get my general news from BBC radio between 4:50 and 5:30am PST (PDT in the summer), while I'm making and consuming my first cup of coffee. I have a feeling that there is a downside to this practice. Besides the obvious downside of being up. At that hour, up is a downer. Between 4:50 and 5:30am in any time zone, I'm not awake enough to make sense of simple declarative sentences in my American dialect of English. If I have to do a metric conversion on the news, it's bound to get a little garbled.
One morning in November, for example, there were several stories that the Beeb (as the BBC is known among its closest friends) treated with equal importance: the midterm elections in the U.S., the judgment handed down in the Microsoft antitrust trial, the capture of the presumed D.C. sniper, and the Case of Lady Diana's Butler. Here is what I got out of that morning's news:
Princess Diana's butler, Robert Torricelli of New Jersey, was charged with illegally exploiting his monopoly over certain of the late princess's belongings, including letters, pyjamas (as they spell them on BBC radio), her most private APIs, and the highly coveted Hispanic vote.
Under Federal law, Governor Jesse Ventura of Minnesota was required to name a successor to the deceased princess. His choice of singer Elton John was generally regarded as uncharacteristically statesmanlike for a former professional wrestler whose neck is bigger than his head.
In Florida, new electronic voting machines began to be delivered to the precincts. One of those giant cockroaches that Floridians call Palmetto bugs got into the works of one and it began spitting out votes for Governor Jeb Bush even before it was unpacked. "That's not a bug," quipped the Governor, "That's a feature!"
Capitol police took a tree stump into custody, but the stump turned out to know nothing about OEM contracts, and the police released it to resume its contest against former blood collector Elizabeth Dole for the North Carolina Senate seat formerly occupied by yet another of those American chappies named Jesse.
Sun Microsystems' Chief Scientist Bill Joy issued a statement from his Colorado mountaintop retreat to the effect that not everything starting with a "J" was a Sun software technology, and that Sun was not responsible for Jesse Helms or Jeb Bush or Elton John, although it did invent Jesse Ventura. Florida Congressional candidate Kathleen Harris immediately certified his press release.
Then, in a stunning reversal from the general pattern of midterm elections since the Second World War, the Queen of England suddenly remembered that, while driving her around the Washington, D.C., area in a white van several months ago, Bill Gates had told her in detail of his plan to eliminate all competition in the computer software market and turn America into one big company town, in which everyone would work for Microsoft and consume nothing but Microsoft products. "Such a charming little dweeb," the dotty monarch added.
Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, recently returned from a 15-month vacation in Antibes, had no choice but to drop all charges against the sniper in return for his promise not to kill any of those particular people again.
Jerry Pournelle was unavailable for comment.
Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
mike@swaine.com